Raul, On May 30, 2008, at 12:25 PM, Raul Echeberria wrote:
My comment was in the sense of comparing the scenario with the policy approved vs. the scenario without this policy.
The situations aren't analogous. There is only one IANA from which the RIRs obtain addresses. There are 5 RIRs and there are many organizations which obtain addresses from more than one RIR. For example, if a service provider in Europe were to establish a legal presence in (say) Namibia and request address space, what restrictions would be placed upon the announcement of that address space and how would AfriNIC enforce those restrictions (or even determine they were being violated)? The point is that I view Tony's proposal as an attempt to pragmatically deal with the reality that businesses are likely going to do what they can to ensure they meet customer requirements, regardless of the arbitrary geographical monopolies put in place when there was more address space than people could count. Questions of "fairness" get extremely complex when you get into resource scarcity (e.g., fair to whom? Will it be fair that a charity NGO based in Geneva will be unable to get any address space whereas DeBeers will be able to get as much as they desire?) and I personally think it naive to assume that the folks with money aren't going to be able to get what they want, regardless of "set asides"... Regards, -drc